Today, as Charlotte Zammit is laid to rest following her tragic death on 15 August, the Malta Women's Lobby has released a powerful and unsparing statement condemning systemic failures in protecting women from gender-based violence.

Highlighting a grim and growing toll of victims since 1978, the lobby rejects the cyclical public response of shock followed by silence, demanding urgent, concrete action from the government. The statement calls for radical reforms - including true accountability within the courts, the immediate removal of violent perpetrators from the family home rather than uprooting victims, and comprehensive preventative education across all levels of society to dismantle the deep roots of patriarchy and victim-blaming.

"Today, 21st August, Charlotte Zammit, the latest femicide victim, will be laid to rest. We hold her memory and her name and extend our deepest condolences to the family, her children, and friends," the group said.

Zammit was found dead in a residence in Zabbar on 15 August. Roderick Agius has since been charged with her murder.

Since news of Charlotte Zammit's death, the public was presented once again with the roll-call of women in Malta and Gozo killed by partners, former partners, boyfriends, and mostly men known to them. Since 1978, that list runs to more than 40 names, and it is not exhaustive. It is not a timeline. It is a record of institutional failure, published in instalments.

As a lobby, we could not let this latest tragic death go by without speaking out, the statement said.

"We are angry, and we say so plainly. Each femicide is met with the same choreography: shock, headlines, at most a vigil, a statement, a promise. Then silence, until the next one, when another name is added to the collection like a card slotted into an album. Women in this country are not trading cards. They were daughters, mothers, sisters, colleagues, neighbours. Adding a name is not a response. It is an admission that nothing changed after the last one," the statement added.

The voices of victims are not being heard. Women report. Women are disbelieved, minimised, sent home, told to think of the children, told not to ruin a man's life and to stop the court proceedings if they want to avoid further trouble. And when they are killed, the questioning turns on them: why did she stay? Why did she go back? What did she do? Who was she with? Victim-blaming is not a private failing of a few cruel individuals. It is a public reflex, and it is rehearsed daily in the comment sections of Facebook, in workplaces, in bars, in kitchens and beyond.

This is not only about men, the group said. It is convenient to frame gender-based violence as a problem of "bad men" to be educated. It is also women who push other women down, who look smugly at victims and survivors, who repeat that she must have known what she was getting into, who close ranks around a man because he is family or because he is useful. Patriarchy has poisoned all of us, directly and indirectly. The roots are deep, and they run through every one of our institutions and through our own households. Naming that is not disloyalty to women. It is the precondition for change.

"We are disgusted that dangerous men are granted one bail after another. Men with documented histories of violence against their partners, sometimes extreme, are released, and released again, while the women they have harmed are left to deal with their own survival," the statement said.

"We are disgusted that it is still women and children who must leave home. In 2026, the burden of flight remains on the victim. She packs a bag, she uproots her children, she loses her bed, her street, her school-run, her routine. The perpetrator keeps the house. Malta has the legal instruments to reverse this. They must be used as the rule, not the exception. We have been repeating this and yet nothing happens," the statement said.

We are not satisfied with how our courts handle these cases. Cases drag on for years. Sittings are put off and put off again. Decisions are handed down that leave women no safer than before. None of this is merely a matter of administration: every delay tells a woman that her safety can wait and tells the man who is harming her that very little will happen to him.

And we are not doing nearly enough to educate the coming generation. Consent, coercive control, financial abuse, jealousy dressed as love, the difference between conflict and control. These conversations need to happen in every school, every sports club, every youth organisation, every seminary and every workplace, taught consistently and from an early age. Prevention is not a leaflet campaign after a funeral.

The Malta Women's Lobby therefore called on Government to place femicide prevention, court reform and the removal of perpetrators from the family home at the centre of policy, with published timelines and reporting against Malta's obligations under the Istanbul Convention.

Sadly, we have become efficient at mourning and negligent at preventing. Every time another woman is killed, we are told it was a tragedy nobody could have foreseen. That is a blatant lie. The warnings are documented, the patterns are known, and the list is public.

 What is missing is the will to act between one funeral and the next, the group said.